


subscriptions

by ofhobbitsandwomen (litvirg)



Series: youtubers au [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff, Social Media, Youtuber AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-08 23:16:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6878791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/litvirg/pseuds/ofhobbitsandwomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke does drunk movie reviews. Bellamy has a channel on Greek mythology. Somehow one leads to the other.<br/>[A Bellarke YouTubers AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	subscriptions

It started off as a joke. 

Back when she and Raven shared a dorm, bottles of tequila stashed away in their dresser drawers, they’d been looking for something to kill time with--mainly something to do while they put off coursework--and three shots into the night, they’d decided turned the camera on and started talking. 

It spiralled in a lot of different directions, but when they watched it back the next morning, it was mainly about movies, whichever movie they’d seen most recently, so they cut out the bits around it, and put that chunk on YouTube. Just because, well, why the hell not. 

They did it again the next week, purposefully picking out a crap movie to watch on the Tv while Raven’s laptop sat open, recording them trashing the movie, passing a bottle back and forth. The longer the night went on, the emptier the bottle got, the more ridiculous the review got. 

They posted it anyway, the next morning, cutting out the bits where they sat in silence or talked so loud over each other that it was impossible to make out what they were actually saying. Clarke fell asleep halfway through editing it, but Raven sliced it down to five minutes, posting it the same day. 

They didn’t really expect anything to happen from it. It was just a way to blow off steam, something to do friday nights when they were too lazy or uninterested in going out. In no way did they ever think anyone would watch the videos.

The definitely didn’t think they’d become popular. 

But after the first three, they started getting crazy amounts of hits. Clarke, scrolling through tumblr, saw someone call it the next  _ Wine About It _ or  _ My Drunk Kitchen _ . There were gifs of their videos--not many, but a few, and enough to get them more hits on the videos, and some subscribers to the channel. 

Then they started getting messages, requests for movies to review, sheets full of movie drinking games they could play during their next video, and they just got in the habit of making one a week. It went on throughout undergrad, the two of them always living together, always having time to do at least one video a week, and they watched their views and subscribers grow and grow and grow all the way until graduation, when they were moving away. 

Not far, still within a couple hours of each other. But Raven was off in grad school, doing some sciencey, engineering thing that Clarke could never understand, and she was staying in the same city as their school, working a few jobs until she figured out how to actually use her degree. 

It wasn’t ideal, living two hours away from your best friend, but it wasn’t the worst and even though the videos had always been a thing they did together, they clung to them, a way to keep them in contact, no matter what. So every week, one of them would watch a movie, voted on by the viewers, and they would record themselves, and send it to the other one to edit and publish. Mondays for Clarke’s videos, Thursdays for Raven’s. 

It was a good system and it worked. Raven would tell the viewers to send in requests for what Clarke should watch next, and Clarke would do the same for her. The parts they didn’t publish were little video letters, meant for the other to see while they were editing. It was like pen pals, but with far more whiskey. 

So Clarke, after a ten hour shift at the little Italian restaurant she worked at, logged into her computer to see five messages from Raven. 

**_I hate you for making me watch this._ **

**_I’m telling our viewers to recommend something horrible for you._ **

**_Oh man, their choices really are bad._ **

**_Would you prefer the fourth Bring it On movie or literally anything with Adam Sandler? Those seem to be the frontrunners_ **

**_Spoke too soon. Get ready for two hours of loosely interpreted, action packed, Greek mythology nonsense. Clash of the Titans, bitch._ **

Clarke groaned, rolling onto her back, shoving her face into the back cushions of the couch. Of course Raven would pick one of those movies for her. One of those action dude flicks marketed specifically to nerd boys who thought the only reason they couldn’t get laid was because they played video games. One of those ones with golden bras and skimpy leather skirts that were somehow supposed to pass off as armour. 

She wrinkled her nose, pulling up the preview, pulling out her phone to text Raven back. 

**_Honestly would have preferred an Adam Sandler movie_ ** . 

It was only a moment before she got a reply. 

**_Cross your fingers, maybe next week you’ll get lucky._ **

She rolled her eyes at Raven, as if she could see her, and walked to the kitchen, feet dragging, to find whatever booze she had left from her last run to the liquor store. It wasn’t much. Maybe three quarters of a glass of wine that she was sure she’d saved from the last video just so she wouldn’t have to admit to finishing an entire bottle of wine on her own on a tuesday night. Other than that, there was a half full bottle of tequila, a birthday gift from Raven, that she hadn’t touched since the day. 

Tequila-drunk Clarke tended to be a much different Clarke than wine-drunk Clarke, and she wasn’t sure how great it would be for her to get it all recorded, and then posted on the internet, but it was her only choice, unless she wanted to walk a few block down to the store, which, no. 

Gritting her teeth, she grabbed the bottle. She thought briefly about making margaritas, but one glance of her blender off in the corner of her kitchen, blades bent and broken, reminded her of exactly why the bottle had sat in the back of her cupboard since her birthday. So she settled for grabbing the jar of sweets off her kitchen table and a can of strawberry lemonade, the bottle of tequila tucked under her arm. 

She pulled the arm chair over to her desk where her laptop sat on her desk, the jar of sweets landing with a thud next to it. 

“Alright,” she sighed, pulling up the movie in one window, her webcam in the other. “Time to do this.”

***

“I know,  _ I know _ he’s some important character in this movie,” Clarke was saying into her webcam. Her cheeks were warm and red and there was a thin layer of sweat barely creeping in at the tip of her hairline. “But I cannot for the life of me see him as anything other than Liam Neeson in a funny costume. Like, I’m not the only one, right?”

The truth was, Clarke had no idea what was going on in the movie. Theoretically it shouldn’t have been hard to follow. Gods versus Titans and all that. Or was it gods versus other gods? It was hard to tell, and it was even harder to tell if that was the fault of the movie or the tequila. 

“Am I missing something?” Clarke said to her screen. “Like, Hades isn’t the major villain in Greek mythology right? Who am I supposed to be rooting for here?”

She pulled up the summary of the movie, trying to figure it out. It was hard to focus on the text on the screen with everything buzzing around in her head. 

“The...kraken..is the villain? What’s happening in this movie?”

She clicked around some more, trying to find some sort of explanation of what was happening in the movie. Or at least what was supposed to be happening in the movie. All the characters looked the same--dirt covered burly men with long hair and beards, lots of white light flashing around them--it was hard to keep them straight. 

After a few more minutes of searching, the movie playing in the background all the while, she stumbled across a video review of the movie, some youtube guy-- _ TheModernOvid _ he called himself--who did videos about greek and roman myths. 

She paused the movie and clicked on the video, curious. 

“Alright friends,” the man on the screen said. “I finally got around to watching  _ Clash of The Titans _ \--per many of your request. And I am never doing that again.” He laughed, smiling at the camera. He was shaking his head and Clarke leaned in, as if he was actually in the room and she wanted to be closer to him. 

“No, seriously. It was awful. How could you guys do me like that?”

He had a mop of brown hair, unruly, curly, and falling over his forehead into his eyes. His skin was smooth and dark, tanned like honey and cinnamon, with freckles scattered all across his nose and cheeks. 

“Let’s start with the obvious, shall we?” the man continued. 

“Yes,” Clarke nodded along, grabbing the bottle of tequila and taking a swig. “Let’s.”

“Whoever decided to make Hades the villain in literally every Hollywood adaptation of Greek mythology needs to crack a book. Like, seriously. You don’t even need to know that much about mythology to figure that one out. The majority of conflicts in Greek mythology were caused because Zeus couldn’t keep it in his pants. Next point…”

“Ha!” Clarke clapped her hands and looked right at the camera. “I knew it! Thank you, Professor Handsome.”

“Secondly,” the boy shook his head, sighing. His hands were raised, shaking in the air, before he even started speaking. “What the hell is the kraken doing in the middle of a ‘Greek myth’?” The last two words were in air quotes as his face deadpanned, staring at the screen for a second before carrying on. “The kraken is from Norse mythology!”

He sighed again. 

“Our boy sure does sigh a lot,” Clarke mused at the camera. Not that she could blame him. The movie was horrible--and she was only part of the way through it. 

“I--I’m just not even going to say more about that one, honestly. Wrong mythology, nice try, swing and a miss. Next.”

It went on like that for the better part of ten minutes, but Clarke barely even noticed the time passing. He was funny, far more entertaining than the movie she was supposed to be watching. And he was into it, very clearly super invested in all the mythologies he was talking about. It was actually pretty adorable, this grown man flustered and excited talking about all these myths, his eyes and smiles wide.

When the video was over, Clarke meant to go back to the movie, to finish up her viewing so she could send the video to Raven to edit and post. But autoplay was on, and before she could switch back to the window to exit out, the same, low gravely voice was spilling out of her speakers, greeting her. 

“What badass are we going to talk about today, I hear you asking.” He was smiling, like before, his glasses slipping down his nose and Clarke found that, combined with the blank tank top he wore, nearly distracting enough to pull her away from what he was saying. Nearly.

She pulled her candy jar closer, grabbing a handful of sweets and tipping back in the chair. A few more minutes couldn’t hurt. 

***

It was three days before Raven got through all the stuff she sent her, editing it down to five minutes and posting it, texting her to let her know it was done. 

**_All set. You’re welcome, by the way_ ** . 

Clarke bit her lip, wondering what the hell Raven was talking about. After a moment, she decided that with Raven, it was always safer to let it slide then to inquire further, so she tucked her phone into her back pocket, and made her way out the door. 

Whatever she meant, Clarke was sure that it would come up soon enough. 

***

Four days after making the video, one day after posting it, Clarke woke up to the incessant pinging of her phone. She sat up, grabbing it off her nightstand, expecting it to be texts from Wells or Raven, or her mother, but instead, she found, it was mostly Twitter notifications. 

A bunch of random users, names she didn’t recognize, all tweeting at the same person. 

**_@themodernovid have you seen this video??_ **

**_@drunkreviews says what we’ve all been thinking about @themodernovid_ **

**_Ship name for @clarke-reviews and @themodernovid ??_ **

She scrolled through them, clicking on TheModernOvid’s twitter handle to get to their page to see what the hell they were all talking about, and the other night came flooding back. His icon was the same as his youtube icon, just a picture of himself against a blue background, smiling. 

He had one tweet about the video quoted, right at the top of his page. 

**_@murphyslaw: @themodernovid, can you believe there’s another person who hated Clash of the Titans as much as you did??_ **

His response was above the quote. 

**_@murphyslaw: not possible. Checking it out now._ **

Clarke quickly clicked the link on the tweet, bringing her browser back to her own YouTube channel to watch the video she hadn’t even bothered to check after Raven posted it. Sinking back into the pillows she realized, very, very quickly that Raven had scrapped nearly the entirety of her actually watching Clash of the Titans, and packed the rest of the video full of her ‘review’ of TheModernOvid’s channel. 

Much of which included talking about his face. Or his arms. Or his nerdy hand waving. 

She groaned, flattening her face against the pillow. As if posting a weekly video where she drunkenly reviewed bad movies wasn’t bad enough. Now, apparently, she was posting a video where she drunkenly hit on a guy through the computer screen. 

She reached for her phone and tipped her head out of the pillow just long enough to maneuver through her contacts and get to Raven. 

**_Internet fame has gone to your head. You’re dead to me, Reyes_ ** . 

***

She’d managed to stop thinking about the global, internet humiliation for a few hours while she went out and ran some errands; picking up groceries, stopping at the bank, all normal adult things she always put off until she absolutely couldn’t anymore. And she forgot the embarrassment from the morning. She’d turned Twitter notifications off on her phone, because the stream was never ending, which helped to put it out of her mind. 

When she got home though, the groceries all put away, the laundry done, and she was just sitting on her couch, she felt the urge to grab her laptop. 

Luckily, before she’d even gotten the chance to scroll through the hundreds, yes  _ hundreds _ , of notifications on her feed, she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. Raven, of course. 

**_Might want to check this out. And I repeat, YOU’RE WELCOME._ **

Clarke clicked the link Raven had sent her, bringing her back to the channel page for TheModernOvid. The first video on his page was a response to her video. 

She clicked play to find him, smiling sheepishly, sat in front of the camera, his glasses and that same blank tank top she’d admired from the other videos. He gave a wave before he started talking. 

“Alright, Bellamy here, guys, ready to tell you, yes, yes, yes, I  _ have _ seen that video from the  _ Drunk Reviews _ channel. Thank you all for sending me the link a hundred times!” He laughed, his head dipping down so his chin bumped his chest. 

“Special shout out to Clarke, our amazing reviewer, who inspired all this madness.”

Clarke felt herself blush and she moved to cover her face with her hand even though she knew he--or anyone else--wasn’t around to see her. 

“Now Clarke,” he said, pulling the camera closer to him, schooling his face into a serious expression. “You definitely came to the right place regarding Clash of the Titans. You’re actually the only person I’ve met--well, haven’t met you, but I went through and watched a fair number of your reviews so, we’re on the same page there at least--but one of the few people I’ve seen who hate this movie as much as I do.”

He shrugged his shoulders, taking a deep breath. “Not to say that others don’t hate it. Because they do. Rightly so.”

She gave a small chuckle at that. 

“Anyway, I decided to make this video for you, Clarke, so I can give you a few options for movies based on Greek myths that _ aren’t _ totally abhorrent. There aren’t actually a lot of them, so it’s a pretty short list, but a few are better than none right?”

He went on, listing the movies, explaining exactly why they ranked at least twenty points above Clash of the Titans on whatever weird scale he’d come up with, and again, she found it hard to focus on exactly what it was he was saying, so preoccupied by how he was saying it. 

“Anyway.” His cheeks were pink, a flush creeping all the way down his neck. “That’s probably way more than you bargained for when you made that video, but,” another shrug. “Wanted to help out a pretty girl in desperate need of some better mythology movies.”

He talked for a few seconds more, mostly addressing his regular viewers, before pulling her back into it all. 

“Seriously guys, go check out Clarke’s channel. She’s got some insane things to say about Hollywood. Definitely worth subscribing to.”

With that he signed off, a shy wave and a big red NERD flashing across the screen that she couldn’t help but think wasn’t put there by him. 

She clicked over to her own page, noticing the subscription number a little higher than it was the day before. Clicking on it, she noticed his username was the first on the list. She grabbed her phone. 

**_@themodernovid thanks for the advice! definitely going to have to check a few of those out._ **

It was only a minute before she got a reply. 

**_@clarke-reviews happy to help. let me know how they rank._ **

She bit her lip, conflicted for just a moment. But then she clicked the “follow” button on his page, and waited--barely a moment--before she got a notification from his account. 

**_@themodernovid is now following you._ **

She went to his page, browsing through his tweets, most of them responding to viewers, answering questions, posting pictures, all the things she and Raven saved for their channel’s account instead of their individual pages. 

She opened the direct messages. 

**_Sorry if that video was weird. My friend Raven edited everything I sent her and decided to scrap the chunk where I actually watched the movie I was supposed to be reviewing._ **

She felt a flush creep onto her face before he even answered. 

**_No, it was funny._ **

A second went by and then another message from him popped up. 

**_Didn’t mean to be too forward in my video. But in my defense, you spent like three of the five minutes of yours making some comment about my arms._ **

**_At least one of those minutes were about your freckles_ ** , she typed. 

She fell back into her couch, waiting for a response. A wave washed over her that she hadn’t felt in a long time and she couldn’t help the smile that crept on her face. The butterflies in her stomach, the blush on her cheeks, the compulsion to laugh as soon as she saw his message. She sighed, clicking to his profile to take another look at his picture while she waited for his response. 

It had been awhile since she’d had a crush. Even longer since she’d sat on the couch waiting for them to text her back, like she was in highschool. But it was nice. She closed out of the app and went into her messages with Raven. 

**_Fine_ ** , she sent her.  **_I guess a ‘thank you’ isn’t totally uncalled for_ ** . 

**_Ha!_ ** Raven sent back a moment later.  **_You totally owe me one._ **

Clarke rolled her eyes as she read it, but smiled. She really, really did. 

**Author's Note:**

> possibly up for writing a part two of this, if given the right encouragement.  
> and apparently i'm super into writing fluff now, so drop some prompts at ofhobbitsandwomen on tumblr!


End file.
